Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

Reframing Your Community’s Mind

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In an earlier posting, I wrote about frames—those familiar ways of thinking that help us make sense of a complicated world—and why it’s important in advancing new ideas to connect them to familiar and comforting frames. But what if the frame itself is the problem? Rather than helping people think about new ideas, what if the frame stops helpful discussions cold?

It happens all the time. But let’s be clear: The problem isn’t that people use frames, it’s that they’re using the wrong ones. That’s because even the most intellectually gifted among us need frames, which work like filters allowing some ideas in and keeping others out, to think about complex situations and focus on good solutions. But if we want to bring helpful ideas to our communities, it’s critical that we use the right frames to think about our problems and our communities. And if we’re using the wrong ones, we need to, well, reframe our thinking. As you’ll see, this is not easy but it is possible.

But, first, what exactly is a frame that might be used in communities? Usually, it’s a mental picture and a set of associations. Less commonly, it’s an analogy. Here are some examples: A community might think of itself as a “great small town,” with a set of associations that flow from that picture. (Not surprisingly, many people in such places think of the old Andy Griffith television show and its images of Mayberry.) A different frame, perhaps for an in-town neighborhood: young and hip, and the associations that flow from that. Less common are frames that are analogies, such as seeing a community as a business, a team, a family or a club.

So, how can good frames go wrong? They go wrong when reality changes and the frames don’t. I’ve worked recently in a suburban county that has seen massive demographic changes in the past 20 years. The ethnic composition has gone from 90 percent white to 50 percent in the last 20 years, its residents are aging rapidly, and the economic base has shifted dramatically as it has become a major center of employment. In short, it is more urban today than suburban. But the frame used by many leaders and citizens is that of 20 years ago: We’re a nice, affordable, low-tax, family-oriented suburb where people move to get away from urban problems, not deal with them.

You can see the problem here. By stopping people from thinking about urban issues—diversity, density, new styles of development, new modes of transportation, poverty and crime—the frame prevents leaders from dealing with the community’s most pressing problems and opportunities.

So, what do you do in this kind of situation? You help people change their frames. You do this in two ways: First, through a concerted effort to show why the old frame doesn’t work. Second, by suggesting a frame that fits the new reality.

Sound impossible? Well, it’s difficult and requires great patience, but this reframing process happens often enough that we know it’s not impossible. Here’s an example: smoking as a public health problem. If you can remember back that far, think about how smokers behaved around non-smokers 30 years ago. They lit up. Smoking was allowed in almost every public place in America, except elevators, buses and airplanes that were parked on the ground.

What drove the smokers out of doors wasn’t something they did, but a change in the frame used by non-smokers. Earlier, non-smokers may have been annoyed when an officemate started puffing away. They may even have complained. But they had no standing to ask smokers to leave; that required a great deal of well-publicized research on the dangers of second-hand smoke, and the reframing of smoking as a menace and not just an annoyance to non-smokers. (Or to put the frame in more positive language, non-smokers discovered they had a right to healthy air.)

That’s what it takes to change the frames used by communities as well. It takes a persistent but respectful campaign against the old frame (“we’re not the sleepy suburb we once were”), together with careful documentation of the changes (the demographic and economic shifts), matched with a new and positive frame (“we’re the suburb of the 21st century, diverse, dynamic and forward-looking”).

Don’t expect this to be a quick change in thinking. People accept new ideas reluctantly; they accept entire new ways of thinking about things even more reluctantly. But it’s critical work for leaders, because if you want better solutions, it’s necessary to think about problems and opportunities in new ways. And often that starts with a new frame. Albert Einstein saw the same thing in science:  “To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.” Works pretty well in communities, too.

Photo by Chris Waits licensed under Creative Commons.

Framing Your Change Efforts

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In earlier postings, I talked about the roles of activists in introducing ideas and champions in moving ideas toward acceptance. But ideas don’t live in a vacuum. They are part of an infrastructure of thought that includes things that are bigger than ideas—they are ways of seeing the world and making sense of it. In 1922, Walter Lippmann called these things “pseudo-environments.” But to use more contemporary language, let’s call them “frames.”

Actually, you know frames quite well because we all use them. If they’re our frames, we might call them “values” and “beliefs.” In others, they could be considered “ideology.” Frames are, as Lippmann explained in his book “Public Opinion”, “the picture in (our) heads” that helps us understand our everyday environments.

. . . (T)he real environment is altogether too big, too complex and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it.

And that’s what frames offer us: a simpler model we can use to make sense of things and act on them.

Ever wonder how a friend or family member could read the same newspaper article as you—say, a story about a college student who was robbed while walking home at midnight—and come to the opposite conclusion about what it meant? While you were muttering, “Serves him right; he should have been studying,” your brother was fuming about the lack of police presence. Your frame: “In the end, it’s all about personal responsibility.” Your brother’s: “This is what happens when you cut city budgets.”

It’s important to think about frames as you consider how to make changes in your community. True, some changes are so narrowly focused or unexpected that they don’t fit into most people’s frames. You see this in natural disasters. When a tornado flattens a block in your city’s downtown, nobody questions the motives of weather fronts. But not many important changes escape the framing process.  Let’s say your downtown organization wants to level a block and replace some shabby old buildings with new condos. You may find people framing your plans in unexpected ways, as some inveigh against greedy developers and business interests, while others think it would be nice to have more people living downtown.

Given this almost universal need for placing new ideas into old frames, people involved in change efforts should use this tendency to their advantage and connect their change efforts to the strongest, most widely accepted frames around. Want taxpayers to pay for more parks in your city? You could connect it to a tried-and-true frame, like “it’s good for quality of life” or go with something more current like “parks promote active recreation, which reduces childhood obesity.”

In a future posting, I’ll talk about how leaders can change community frames themselves. It isn’t easy, but sometimes it’s necessary to do more than win acceptance of ideas—you need to change the very ways large numbers of people make sense of their city and its issues.

Photo by marcmoss licensed under Creative Commons.

Enter the Champion

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It won’t come as a surprise to many leaders, but change is hard. And the greater the change—the greater the shift in thinking or habits—the harder it is. The wonder is, given the difficulty, that people ever change their minds on important things.

But they do. My theory, which I call the drip-drip-drip theory, is that it begins with doubts—things that can’t be easily reconciled with a person’s present views. As the doubts mount (drip, drip, drip), the person struggles more and more to reconcile them, until suddenly she shifts, sometimes reversing long-held beliefs. This is how Democrats become Republicans and vice versa. The declaration (“I’ll never vote for another Democrat!”) comes overnight, but it’s usually preceded by a steady stream of doubts (drip, drip, drip).

But there are things that can help people take that final step in accepting a new idea. One of the most effective is the entry of a champion—a respected person who has accepted the new idea and can vouch that it is reasonable and worthy of support.

Two notes in thinking about champions: First, the champion need not be an individual; it can be a group of respected leaders. Example: In 2007, business leaders in Florida’s Tampa-St. Petersburg area announced it was time to develop a regional light-rail transit system. This wasn’t a new idea, but it wasn’t considered seriously until the business leaders weighed in. (In surprisingly short order, the Florida Legislature passed enabling legislation and planning began on the system.)

Second, timing is everything. Champions are second-stage leaders who enter when an idea is gaining viability. Their role is to move the idea from fringe to mainstream. Enter the discussion too soon, and they lose credibility; too late and they’re seen as irrelevant.

So who are the best champions? Really, there are only two criteria: That they be well known and credible. They could be elected officials, corporate CEOs or former leaders who remain known and respected.

Perhaps the easiest way of thinking about champions is to look at one we’re all familiar with, former Vice President Al Gore and his role in the climate change debate. Believe it or not, Gore didn’t discover that earth’s climate was changing; it just seems that way.  By 2006 when his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” was released, scientists had been talking about climate change for decades. (Gore said he learned about it in college in the 1960s.)  But because of Gore’s familiarity and credibility, he was able almost overnight to shift the discussion from classrooms and laboratories to dinner tables and legislative chambers.

Gore gave the climate change debate a human face. That makes some in the environmental community uncomfortable; they think Gore is too identified with their cause. (How often do people say sarcastically during a cold snap, “Hey, Al Gore, is it cold enough for you?”) But that instant identification illustrates why champions are so important. Activists understand the complicated ideas they are advancing; most people don’t. They rely on people they respect to assure them that the ideas are sound, that the sacrifices are worthwhile. Few of us can explain the physics behind climate change, but we believe Al Gore understands it and that gives us greater faith—or higher blood pressure, depending on what you think of him.

There’s another role that champions can play, and that is defending the ideas when they come under attack. You can see Al Gore playing this role, too.  When opponents attacked the credibility of climate change scientists not long ago, Gore weighed in with an op-ed article in the New York Times refocusing the discussion on the overwhelming scientific consensus behind climate change. In the long march of ideas in your community, there will be opportunities for champions to play both roles: vouching for new ways of thinking and new courses of action—and defending the ideas when they run into trouble.

Photo by Recylebank licensed under Creative Commons.

Building Relationships That Defy the Odds

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Race and ethnicity are the great divides in America, yet nearly every community—and certainly every city—is diverse, some dizzyingly so. But if it’s so hard to reach across racial and ethnic lines, how can we ever make our communities better places? We couldn’t except for one thing: People do reach across those lines. Not as frequently as we’d like, but enough to help us move forward.

We have a profile of one of those remarkable boundary crossers in an article in the New York Times Magazine. Its title: “The Visible Man.”  It’s the story of how James Fields, a 55-year-old black Methodist minister and former state employment agency worker, came to be a state representative from Cullman County, Ala., population 81,000, less than 1 percent of whom are African American.

It wasn’t just a demographic tide that Fields swam against. He’s a Democrat and supporter of President Obama’s in a state where 88 percent of whites voted for John McCain. Cullman County is staunchly Republican and deeply distrustful of Obama. And that’s not all: Cullman County has a history of being one of Alabama’s most racist places, which is obviously saying a lot. And judging by what the writer, Nicholas Dawidoff, learned in his reporting, racism (or, at least, racist language) is still part of everyday life there.

So how did James Fields, a black Democrat, get 59 percent of the vote in one of the unlikeliest—and, on the surface, inhospitable—places you could imagine? According to the article, Fields had three things that made most white voters pause, consider him seriously and mark his name on the ballot.  First, he was local. He had been born and raised in Cullman County, and in such a place—out of step with the rest of America and proudly so—that meant a lot. Second, he was known by many white families because he had helped many of them find jobs in his days at the employment agency. From these experiences, white families knew him as hard working, thoughtful and far more like themselves than they could have expected

Finally, he emphasized the thing that bonded him mostly closely to his white neighbors: their shared religion. When he began his campaign for state representative against a white Republican candidate, Rev. Fields took out a newspaper ad urging that the candidates conduct a campaign that was “God-driven and Christ-centered.” This might cause eyes to roll elsewhere, but in small-town Alabama, where almost everyone is a Christian and many passionately so, it conveyed the message that James Fields is “one of us.”

And it’s not just in Cullman County that such cultural boundary crossings occur. Dawidoff interviewed other black political leaders from mostly white constituencies in Alabama and Mississippi and heard similar stories. Locy Baker, a former teacher and school administrator who is serving his fourth term as a state representative from Southeast Alabama, said it helped that he was local and known. “I (have) been living here all my days,” Baker told Dawidoff. “Grew up here. People know me.” And if you’ve spent time helping others—particularly those from different backgrounds—that’s a big help too. James Young, the mayor of Philadelphia, Miss., said, “It took me 30-plus years of working in this community to be where I am. It did not happen overnight. I tell younger people, live your life serving people, and it will come back to benefit you.” (Yes, Young is mayor of that Philadelphia, Miss., the place where three young civil rights workers were murdered in 1964 and the setting of the movie”Mississippi Burning”.)

So what are the lessons that James Field could teach other community leaders? First, establish your bona fides. If you weren’t born in the community, show how you’ve accepted it in the way you talk and what you say. Second, go beyond networking—networking is fine, but actually helping people is much, much better, especially if those you help are different from you. Third, look for opportunities that help others see what you have in common. For James Fields, it was a shared faith. In other places it might be a love of the local team, the neighborhood festivals, a respected charity or a beloved restaurant.

In the end, it’s about building relationships in spite of the forces that keep people apart. James Fields knows how to do it in Cullman County, Ala. You can do it in your city too.

Photo by Jeremy Wilburn licensed under Creative Commons.

How Activists Change Minds

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Community leaders come in many types. Let me focus on one type: the activist whose work is that of changing minds. I recently ran across a great example of one of these mind-changing activists, Fran Lee.

Who? Perhaps you know Lee’s legacy: New York City’s pooper-scooper law. The law, passed in 1978, requires dog owners to pick up their pet’s waste (at first, people did so with a long-handled contraption known as a “pooper-scooper”). Today, many cities have laws requiring owners to pick up their pets’ waste, but this was a radical—even laughable—notion in the 1970s. I know. I lived in New York in the early 1970s when the only instructions for pet owners were signs that said “curb your dog.” That meant steering them to the curb to relieve themselves, so the street sweepers could dispose of it. (Many missed those instructions, as I quickly learned.)

Enter Fran Lee, a white-haired consumer activist, one-time actress, occasional TV consumer reporter and longtime community scold, who died at age 99 on Feb. 13, 2010. As the New York Times said in its obituary, her passion was health and safety issues. Her son said she collected medical journals that doctors threw out, so she could read up on things like “spider bites, ticks, all sorts of diseases.”

And that’s what got her interested in dog waste, her obit says.

At the behest of a New York doctor, Ms. Lee took up the cause of dog waste. In the early ’70s she founded Children Before Dogs, a group whose aim was the elimination of all such waste from city streets. As she explained often in interviews, Toxocara canis, a tiny roundworm found in dog feces, poses health risks, especially to children. At its most severe, it can cause blindness.

Who could have imagined that, in five or six years’ time, Fran Lee could change so many minds about a problem so commonplace that most people just shrugged and watched their step? How did she do it? Let me suggest some ways: By doing her homework (all those medical journals), vividly portraying the problem (blindness! in children!), commanding attention (she knew the media and she knew how to perform in front of cameras). But most of Lee’s success, I would bet, was simple persistence.

And here’s where I’ll offer a theory of how minds are changed: the drip-drip-drip theory. People give up familiar ways of thinking reluctantly, and if you want people to change their minds, you need to be in their faces constantly, reminding them of the problem (drip), pointing to the facts (drip), demanding action (drip). If you’re good at it and a little lucky, at last the mental dam breaks, and people make the shift from one position (what can you do?) to another (dog owners ought to clean up after their pets!).

And that’s where people like Fran Lee come in. She didn’t mind being a pain, which all good activists must be (the Times described her as “a force of nature, simultaneously encapsulating Ralph Nader, a favorite Jewish grandmother and a foghorn”). And she had a passion for unlikely causes that, by sheer persistence, she could make others’ causes as well.

Photo by mag3737 licensed under Creative Commons.

About Otis White

Otis White is president of Civic Strategies, Inc., a collaborative and strategic planning firm for local governments and civic organizations. He has written about cities and their leaders for more than 30 years. For more information about Otis and his work, please visit www.civic-strategies.com.

The Great Project

Otis White's multimedia book, "The Great Project," is available on Apple iTunes for reading on an iPad. The book is about how a single civic project changed a city and offers important lessons for civic leaders considering their own "great projects" . . . and for students in college planning and political science programs.

For more information about the book, please visit the iTunes Great Project page.

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